Professions exist to serve the needs of society, communities and, in the case of the dental profession, patients. Academic dental institutions strive to help meet these needs by educating and developing future practitioners, educators, researchers, and citizen leaders who serve the community and shape the changing environment in which they practice and provide care. The American Dental Association Commission on Change and Innovation affirms, “If dental educators are to meet these purposes, change and innovation in dental education must be responsive to evolving societal needs, practice patterns, scientific developments, and economic conditions”(Haden, et al., 2006). Guiding any institution through such authentic reform requires a number of strategies. Lee Bolman and Terrance Deal suggest four organizational constructs, or frames, through which to view a complex organization: Structural, Human Resource, Political and Symbolic (Bolman and Deal, 1997).“Like maps, frames are both windows on a territory and tools for navigation” (Bolman and Deal, 1997). This reflective case study examines a major curricular reform initiative in a North American school of dentistry through Bolman and Deal’s organizational frames.
In the midst of changes in the environment of academic dentistry over the past two decades, reform of traditional tenure is one way for dental schools to respond to these changes while maintaining scholarly, evidence-based learning environments. Challenges facing academic dentistry today and in the future include a crisis in workforce capacity, dificulty attracting recent graduates into academic positions, overburdened faculty members with limited time for scholarly activity, loss of tenured faculty members due to retirement, and a potentially diminished voice for dental schools within the parent university. The purpose of this opinion article is to suggest ways to reform the current tenure system in dental education as a means of improving recruitment and retention of new faculty members while maintaining or increasing scholarly activity within dental schools.
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